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Comment by darkchasma | Hacker News Reader

I was certain that Bush Jr. was going to go down in history as the worst president in my lifetime. But if Obama doesn't straighten this out soon, it's going to be him. Which is very disappointing, because he showed so much promise before he was elected. But under his watch, whether directly or indirectly, he's created the least free regime of any president ever elected in the US.

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It's a mistake to think that the Presidents are really in the driving seat when it comes to issues like this. None of them since Eisenhower come out of the military establishment or have any deep background in security policy, so they're reliant on, and credulous of, advisers who are completely bound to the military-intelligence-security-industrial complex.

Obama has dozens of generals and spy chiefs and policy "experts" telling him that if he veers off course the sky will come crashing down on his head. So will the next President.

No one with the immense responsibility of a modern President is going to be able to bring themselves to overrule the expert "advice" of the entrenched mil-sec-intel establishment unless they're already very thoroughly acquainted with its failings.

It is folly to expect a single man to be able to fix this mess. The only way out is to fix the legislative and policy failures that allow the whole structure to exist.

That's fine, the problem is Obama is a liar and a hypocrite. Yes he didn't know that he was making empty promises, but usually when you sign up for a job you know ahead of time whether you can do the job.

Lying during the interview process usually gets you disqualified with prejudice, but he was elected again.

It'd be nice if he apologized after discovering that his promises were a bit excessive.

Obama is a liar and a hypocrite. Bush was a liar and a hypocrite. Clinton was a liar and a hypocrite. Bush Sr. was a liar and a hypocrite.

Did all of these individuals go into office intending to become liars and hypocrites? Or is it more likely that the political system is so dysfunctional that it's not possible for anyone who takes office not to become a liar and a hypocrite.

We've seen that electing different individuals to the same offices isn't solving these problems. It's time to start figuring out how to fix our broken institutions.

Here's a start:

Through the Electoral College, your vote changes without your consent. Entire states "turn blue" when 49% of it are in fact red. Democracy? Hardly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_State...

As a matter of official policy, elected politicians can define constituency boundaries and as such they can manipulate district boundaries at their discretion -- more often than not to their and their party's benefit. Democracy? Hardly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering

Both result in hyper-majorities and as such the far left and the far right unilaterally wield power. Compromise is universally interpreted as capitulation, so there is no middle-ground where they meet. Unless, of course, it has to do with spying on Americans.

> Obama has dozens of generals and spy chiefs and policy "experts" telling him that if he veers off course the sky will come crashing down on his head. So will the next President.

True, but it's actually worse than that. Imagine how the public itself would react to a president who dealt with emerging security threats by saying things like "that's a real threat but we're not going to create anything new to deal with it."

The public would not be kind to them, even though it's the right answer in most cases.

It's probably not even right to say "...they're reliant on, and credulous of, advisers..." when it comes to organizations like the NSA. Many of the executive bureaucracies are probably well-equipped to act on their own initiative, and evade attempts from the White House to exercise direct control over their operations, regardless of whether the president is informed by advisors or acting on his own initiative.

Ironically, an overly-centralized executive branch is actually less adapt at ensuring accountability and transparency in its subordinate organizations, especially ones that have grown as large and complex as the modern federal bureaucracy has.

If we're not going to rein in the power and reduce the scale of the federal government, we're going to need to do something along the lines of making the department secretaries constitutional offices, elected independently, or implement some sort of collegial executive, like Switzerland's. Otherwise, we're going to wind up with a situation where the government is too complex to itself be governed by its constitutional officers (if it isn't already).

But if Obama doesn't straighten this out soon, it's going to be him.

Absurd. The NSA programs that have been in the news lately predate Obama's presidency and were either instituted as part of the Patriot act or existed earlier than that. Hell, when I was growing up in Ireland in the 1970s there were two NSA listening stations on a hill visible from my house, to listen in on the chatter of Russian pilots from the nearby airport where they had a concession.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/109/265122067_954d74fa20.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

I mean, criticize Obama by all means, but 'the least free regime of any President ever elected'? GMAFB. During the Bush presidency that you mention, protesters against the Iraq war had to make their arguments from within fenced cages referred to as 'free speech zones.' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone Other historical examples that spring to mind are the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during WW2, the red scare of the 50s, massive government overreach during the prohibition era, and so on.

I'm not asking you support Obama, but this sort of historical revisionism is just ridiculous.

These type of comments have shown that lately HN has jumped the shark. Calm down with the hyperbole and lets get back to talking about cool and interesting technical topics vs. rhetoric like this.

Less free than under Lincoln, who essentially governed under martial law? Less free than under Wilson, during whose presidency Bureau of Prohibition ran roughshod through the nation searching for illegal booze? Less free than under Nixon, who initiated the "war on drugs" and Reagan, who really militarized it?

Definitely less free than under Wilson. Prohibition was a failure on all fronts[1], and did significantly increase the prison population. But it has nothing on modern drug policy[2].

[1]: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-157.html

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._incarceration_rates_1...

Incarceration rates aren't the only measure, though. Prohibition agents invaded the privacy and property of ordinary mainstream Americans in a way that in the drug war has been limited mainly to minority communities.

If by "ordinary, mainstream" you mean white, you need to remember that the Irish, the Polish, etc. were not considered white at this time.

(not trying to be racist, just trying to accurately describe a racist system)

I don't mean white. Prohibition agents didn't just hassle the Irish and the Polish (though they did particularly focus on immigrants). The invasive nature of Prohibition extended to everyone, across racial lines. Arguably that's why the drug war has lasted so much longer than Prohibition--so far the major injustices of the drug war have been limited to people outside the social mainstream.

> Less free than under Wilson, during whose presidency Bureau of Prohibition ran roughshod through the nation searching for illegal booze?

Clarification: Wilson vetoed the National Prohibition Act, a.k.a. the Volstead Act, but the veto was overridden. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighteenth_Amendment_to_the_Uni...

All of these programs started under Bush. Obama has tried to give legal cover to some of the programs that Bush was conducting illegally. He has ended other illegal programs such as "enhanced interrogations", aka torture.

I guess which one is worse depends on which one you think is scarier, a reckless cowboy or a careful efficient crime boss.

http://breakingbad.wikia.com/wiki/Gustavo_Fring

To be fair, there's never been another presidency with the current combination of technological and societal factors on the scale there is today, so a direct comparison isn't easy to make.

We have had the tech ever since the internet was invented. Don't fool your self and try to find another way to defend our current sitting president.

Er, that's irrelevant - we've never had the societal forces provided by the technologies further up the stack from the actual networking(i.e. Facebook and the like).

But nowadays everyone is connected which makes a huge difference.

Right, nobody has ever engaged in any surveillance before Barack Obama. As someone who 'works for a large defense contractor' you are obviously expert in this area.

Quoting the hip-hop artist KRS-1: "Barack is like the manager of Burger King. All presidents are, including Bush. It's like this... When your fries are cold, if your burger's not done right... you go back to Burger King (America, or your government), and you say, "My burger's cold; I want new fries!" First, you go to the cashier... that's the courts. You argue to the courts... The courts... If you can't get no justice with the cashier, you say, "Let me see the manager! I want to go to Supreme Court. I want to see the president." The manager comes out, "Hi, what can I do for you?" Now the manager can override the decisions of the cashier, but you never get to see the franchise owner of Burger King. If you really have a problem with your burger, you need to go see the franchise owner. We need to go to the top. Or to the bottom [moans]. We need to go where the real architecture of government is. And it's not in a president. It's in a global scheme."

That's a pretty lucid description of the power structure. Except I'm not sure there's a "top".... unless you want to simply point at the whole system of US goverment and its culture.

What if it turns out that each is worse than the last?

A bunch of libertarians are fond of saying that each president eventually makes you nostalgic for the last one.

EDIT: It was actually Calvin Trillin, but I read it on a libertarian blog: http://archive.mises.org/16107/bushs-huge-budget-numbers-bla...

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